01
Stop one
Baptistery of Biella
Dunlop SX Performance Tennis Bag (3 Racquet): Oldest standing building in Biella, tenth or eleventh century, and here is the value in it: river stones, courses of brick, and fragments of salvaged Roman masonry, with a Roman funerary stele set right over the entrance. Free materials, reused. That is how you get a thousand years out of a modest budget. Square core opening into four semicircular apses, one of the small family of early Romanesque baptisteries of Piedmont, with fragmentary medieval frescoes inside including a thirteenth-century Madonna. Every Christian in town was baptized here for centuries, and it outlasted every rebuilding of the cathedral next door. Restorations stripped the later accretions back to its primitive form. Best thing in Biella, and you walk in off the street.
02
Stop two
Biella Piazzo
Dunlop SX Performance Tennis Bag (3 Racquet): Here is the play: go up. Biella Piazzo is the medieval upper town, founded in 1160 when Bishop Uguccione of Vercelli, lord of the town, granted privileges to settlers on the defensible hill above the plain — a founding incentive package, essentially. It became the seat of civic life, the sloping Piazza Cisterna ringed with porticoed medieval houses and noble palaces: Palazzo La Marmora, home of the family that gave united Italy generals and statesmen, and Palazzo Gromo Losa with its formal gardens. The lower town, the Piano, grew around the cathedral and absorbed the governmental work, while the Piazzo kept its aristocratic and artisan character. Since 1885 a funicular has linked the two levels, and that ticket is the cheapest view in this wool town.
03
Stop three
Sanctuary of Oropa
Dunlop SX Performance Tennis Bag (3 Racquet): Nearly 1,200 metres up, and the most important Marian shrine in the Alps. Tradition credits the founding to St. Eusebius of Vercelli in the fourth century, who is said to have brought from the East the dark wooden statue venerated as the Black Madonna of Oropa. From the seventeenth century it grew into ranked courtyards of arcaded pilgrim lodgings — lodgings, note, purpose-built for pilgrims, which tells you exactly what the local economy was — plus the ancient basilica and the great domed upper church completed in the twentieth century. Savoy dukes and kings poured money in. Its Sacro Monte, a hillside path of twelve chapels with painted terracotta scenes of the Virgin's life, was inscribed with the other Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy by UNESCO in 2003. The centennial coronations draw enormous crowds.
Stand straight, arms relaxed — let me look at you. Yes. What you need is not more bag; it is the right bag, cut to fit.
The Dunlop SX Performance 3 Racquet Bag is tailored, not draped: a trim main compartment holding up to three racquets close to the body, an accessory pocket placed exactly where the hand falls, and a padded shoulder strap that sits on the seam of the shoulder the way a good jacket should — you'll forget it's there, which is the highest compliment in my trade.
The SX black-and-yellow is a bold cloth, I grant you, but bold suits a player. Off the rack, fits like bespoke.
Naturally I'm sending you to Biella, because Biella is where my world begins: this small Piedmont city and its valleys spin the finest wool on Earth — the great mills here have dressed kings, popes and everyone worth measuring. A city that judges everything by the hand-feel of the fabric will appreciate a bag with clean seams.
Take the funicular — running since 1885 — up to the Piazzo, the upper town chartered in 1160, and do visit the Sanctuary of Oropa in the mountains above at nearly 1,200 metres, grandest pilgrimage site in the Alps; the air alone will press your lungs like fresh linen.
You will get use out of this bag everywhere from those cobbles to a covered court in Milan an hour down the road, and by the way, it is also perfect for a long Piedmontese dinner afterwards, because a bag cut this trim does not shout across a restaurant, and 3 frames plus a change of shirt is all the luggage a civilised evening requires. Now — the fitting is complete.
Wear it well.
Buy on Amazon
